The Shorts

Season 3, Episode 20: “Good Sports” 7/29/16Starring: Goofy and Mickey MouseSetting: Various sporting venuesPlot: Mickey explains the virtues of good sportsmanship to an assorted bunch of Goofy athletes.

Short Stuff:The use of a narrator and multiple Goofys harkens back to the How to… and instructional shorts of the Classic Era.

Actually, the narrator-driven Goofy shorts of the Classic Era were born out of necessity. Goofy’s voice actor, Pinto Colvig, had left Disney in 1939 so they had to get creative in how to work around his absence. Luckily, Colvig would return in 1944.

Other well-known Disney voices provided by Colvig were both Sleepy and Grumpy from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Pluto (his barks) and the screams of Ichabod Crane from The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad (1949). Colvig also was the very first Bozo the Clown.

The basketball arena appears to be the same venue used during the hockey sequence in Bad Ear Day (2013). However, the retired numbers hanging from the rafters are different.

Mickey’s yellow jacket is evocative of the yellow blazers the ABC Sports Broadcast Team would wear during the 70s.

The music is also similar to the theme from ABC’s sports anthology series Wide World of Sports (1961-1998).

Am I crazy or does Mickey’s announcing style reminiscent of Keith Jackson’s? Of course, Jackson was one of ABC Sports’ lead broadcasters from 1966 - 2006 as well as a fixture on the aforementioned Wide World of Sports.

Of course, all of this talk of ABC Sports makes sense since Disney purchased ABC in 1996. #SYNERGY

The basketball game is a collegial affair pitting University U vs. Technicality Tech.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen “Cavegoofs.” Similar figures make appearances in The Art of Self Defense (1941) and How to be a Sailor (1944).

The soccer sequence takes place at the same arena in Brazil from O’ Futebol Classico (2014) and even shares that episode’s soundtrack.

The following is a list of the featured sports in this cartoon along with their classic counterparts (if applicable):* Basketball – Double Dribble (1946)* Indy Car Racing - NA* Soccer - NA* Baseball – How to Play Baseball (1942)* Volleyball - NA* Hockey – Hockey Homicide (1945)* Football – How to Play Football (1944)* Golf – How to Play Golf (1944)

Final Grade: B+This cartoon plays as a tribute of sorts to the sports themed How to… Goofy shorts of yore. It’s also a tip-of-the-cap to 70s era ABC Sports. I’ve mentioned this before but I’ve never been a big fan of these Goofy cartoons where the narrator does all the talking while multiple Goofys provide all the action. I feel as though it marginalizes the Goofy character and sells him short. However, this current amalgamation of past Goofy cartoons does a wonderful job of doing its part towards correcting those “short” comings. I love the idea of the narrator (as Mickey Mouse) being an actual character that Goofy can see and interact with. This allows for Goofy to have some dialogue and not merely play the part of a detached, pratfall artist. In a vacuum, this episode doesn’t do a whole lot for me but past is prologue and this puts a nice bow on the old, classic Goofy cartoons.